"It is true, Erey, that wheat intolerance is fairly recently discovered. In fact, celiac disease is still misdiagnosed the vast majority of the time...."

This brings to mind when my sister was a baby and cried almost for the first nine months of her life. The first doctor seemed rerally puzzled and kept trying to blame my parents for not knowing how to take care of a baby--she was their third child. Finally a different doctor suggested that my sister had food allergy issues and found substitutes that she was able to digest. "MagicallY" she stopped her constant crying.

I am firmly on the side of MORE info about food/health-related issues--not less.

To answer Jane's comments about food discussions being of little importance in the great scheme of things -

1 - I happen to love to talk about food.

2 - Since we all have to eat, and we all (presumably) wish to eat as healthy as we can (within reason), I see no reason why people shouldn't talk about whatever scientific discovery relative to food and what we eat should not be discussed.

I love to talk about food also, almost as much as I love to eat. I wish to be healthy and I do believe health begins with what you put in your mouth. But I also have epicurian interests also.

This sort of ties into the wheat intolerance we are discussing on this thread. I read an article a few months ago - which I can't find at the moment. Thsi article discusses this huge rise in nut allergies. How nobody ever heard of a nut allergy 30 years ago and now you are having nut free schools and just these kids who can't even be in the same room with a nut - let alone eat one. Where has this come from? And you certainly don't hear about children in Africa having all these nut problems. Many places in Africa use alot of peanuts in the cuisine.

What the article described was that in places where you are forced to eat more natural foods like for example Africa. In places like that where there is really no processed food available and you have to eat with the seasons. Something in season that you are eating now won't be available to you in a few months and you will be eating other things all together. Also, the farming and crop raising techniques are less uniform and there is much more variation between the same crop than there is in the west. This gives the 3rd world eater more variety and much more exposure and this builds up immunities in very small children. Our children don't have the same kinds of immunities because the diet western children eat can be very unvaried. Just alot of the same things over and over.

I have alot of friends that are in the habit of feeding their children one of just a few dinners every evening while the parents have a different meal. So the kid might rotate between three different dinners every night - hot dog and fruit, pizza and carrot sticks or mac and cheese. Just the same things all the time.

Anyway that made me wonder if it was the same sort of issue with wheat.

True Wgal but nut allergies and most food allergies are easy to recognize. You go in to a anaphalactic shock after you ingest them. Your face gets red after you eat a strawberry. Your tounge swells up after you eat a banana. That is pretty easy to see cause and effect.

I can understand how someone might miss a wheat allergy but not a nut allergy. And now we have children so violently allergic that they simply cannot be in the same cafeteria with a pb&j sandwich. Sharing the same area with that sandwich makes them violently ill. That is NEW!

I think you can have food allergies and never know you have them. Perhaps even die of them never knowing that it was something in the food you ate which gave you such a poor health. Certainly what Dot mentions with her wheat allergy having sinus congestion is not something you would ever put together. You would think sinus congestion is due to pollen or something, not wheat.

However the symptoms of peanut allergies don't seem to have changed. You have the same kinds of reactions to really nuts that you have always had. Just we are seeing alot more of it and much more severe than ever before.

What the pediatric allergists who respond to parents' questions in Living Without magazine say is that they're learning that food allergies aren't necessarily obvious. Unfortunately, a good many that cause the symptoms I've had don't show up at all on allergy tests.

Both my parents had significant digestive problems that were never diagnosed as anything organically wrong. I suspect that both probably were wheat intolerant. For all I know, I could be celiac. However, as long as I've been mostly gluten-free but for the occasional lapse, it would do no good to undergo a scoping since I'd have to eat gluten regularly for a couple of weeks or more to damage my intestinal lining enough for celiac disease to be detectable. No thanks! I'm not willing to be sick again for that long a time to find out what I already know: I feel lots better and have no digestive problems when I avoid all gluten.

My sister has had allergy tests but none have shown any results for the foods she knows she can't eat. She refused to drink milk as a child and told me not long ago that that was due to her feeling intensely nauseated every time she ingested anything containing milk. Naturally, the doctor urged Mom to tempt her with puddings and other foods containing milk so that she got adequate calcium. She said that all that stuff made her sick, but as a kid, she hadn't much choice but to eat it anyway. People simply didn't realize when she and I were kids that digestive upset could be caused by mild food allergies.

Also, allergists are now figuring out that people with respiratory allergy problems such as I had regularly each spring and fall often do far better once they identify foods that they may also be sensitive to and eliminate those foods from their diets. For some reason as yet unknown, allergic reactions can be linked so that eating foods you react to can make other allergic reactions worse even though you've not been around any respiratory allergens. I had almost no sense of smell for several years. Within a couple of weeks after cutting all gluten and dairy out of my diet, it gradually came back. I haven't taken a decongestant since late last summer when I was stupid and ate a lovely crusty dinner roll with a creme brulee for dessert at a favorite restaurant. I awoke the next morning with my sinuses going berserk, and my digestion was messed up for three days. I used to take decongestants daily in both spring and fall.

There's now even a condition that's been informally termed "gluten-brain" which manifests as an inability to concentrate, short-term memory lapses and general muzzy-headedness with sometimes symptoms that would suggest mental illness. MRI's may show indications of brain damage in such people. Take them off all gluten, and they gradually improve.

So, no, as Wgal said, allergies don't necessarily manifest in the extreme form of anaphylactic shock.

Also, there's evidence mounting that the extreme reaction of so many more children to peanuts as well as the dramatic increase in various allergies among children today may be due to our being far too clean. I see people on one Disney World board I read saying that they ALWAYS carry hand sanitizer and never let their kids go on public transportation or amusement rides without using hand sanitizer after each time. If one of their kids touches a railing anywhere, they make the kid use hand sanitizer. Can you imagine what they'd do if the kids came in the house covered with mud? Probably scrub them down with Clorox! Small wonder then that our immune systems may have so little real work to do that they turn to regarding foods as threats and triggering allergic reactions. That's one theory, anyway.

All the preservatives, food colorings and artificial flavorings in foods have also been implicated.

That is what I am talking about Dot the severe peanut allergies and other nut allergies. the symptoms and responses have not changed. We are not talking about kids who don't know they are allergic to peanuts and have sinus problems. We are talking about kids who have the same sort of violent response to nuts that people always have. Just as you say more severe and much more frequently.

I think yes, the hyper-santiation can be a culprit. But also back to the food and the diversity in the food. Take the Monsanto potato for example - the soil that is grown in is basically dead. All microbial life is killed and then sterile nutrients are added. So the Monsanto potato you are eating today at Wendy's Hamburgers for example is the same pototato you ate there 3 years ago, etc. Different potatoes no diversity. And it is not just potatoes these kinds of uniform sterility is happening all over the food industry.

Whereas our counterparts in the third world get all different kids of microbes every time they eat. So it is not just that our kids don't eat yam greens like the kids in Africa might but that whatever kind of greens they eat or really any kind of produce lacks diversity in itself.

Scientists are reporting new evidence that drinking coffee may help prevent diabetes and that caffeine may be the ingredient largely responsible for this effect. Their findings, among the first animal studies to demonstrate this apparent link, appear in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry

Can it be both ways? Drink coffee, but don't have fast food. Being a vegetarian there is very little fast food out there which I do partake in.